Copy/Paste Character and Word CounterI often have a need for a character count script to tell me how many characters something contains. I also often find a need for a word count script. Since I never seem to find such a dual-purpose script handy for calculating characters and words all at once, my quickest response is often to open up my Microsoft Word. I wait for the cumbersome software to load, then copy and paste it and wait for Word to think for a while. It stinks, and I finally got really tired of it. There is no need to hog system resources and more screen space by opening Word or a similar software. I nearly always already have a browser window open, so it would be a lot easier to just open a new tab and then copy and paste the content into a quick and easy javascript character counter and word counter.
I have been a web guy for a very long time. I have often found that when I need a script or an application, it is best to just sit down and create it myself. Over the years, I have written a squillion web applications of all kinds. Strangely enough, I often find that the simplest tools to create are also the ones I have a hard time finding the moment to just do it. Once I get around to it, I have often found that there were a lot of others who felt the same way. For example, there are thousands of people every month who use my very basic and aged screen resolution test. I wrote it because at the time I saw a need for it in my daily routine. The same thing happened here.
Simple Javascript Character Counter and Word Counter
I finally got tired of the character count and word count dilemma, and I decided to just write my own handy javascript character count plus word count script. I decided that it should provide live counting when content is typed or pasted into the form, and be quick and painless to load. It started out like this:
Extended Javascript Character Counter, Word Counter, and Etcetera
Since I was already on the task of creating a character counter and word counter, I decided to throw in a couple of extra pieces to create an an all-in-one character countdown script. Since there are so many social networks where characters matter, I thought some of you may find it useful as well. I did not add many just yet, but if there is a countdown you would like me to add, just add your comment here on my blog. I will add it right away.
Add a Character Count to Your Website
If you think this is useful, of course I welcome you to bookmark this page and keep coming back. Feel free to copy and paste either of the snippets below and add them to your site. Simple Javascript Character Counter and Word Counter
Extended Javascript Character Counter, Word Counter, and Etcetera
My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?
You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.
I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.
Squillions of people write tens of thousands of tips each day about search engine optimization. The good search engine optimizers choose their topic carefully, title it just right, tag the information well, add it to their search optimized website, and are sure to address it to the proper audience using just the right keywords. Then they emphasize the call to action, and make it clear why you found the information.
Good SEO (search engine optimizers) write their tips similar to the way they will perform SEO for their clients. In fact, you can tell a lot about them by the tips they give you (it is one of my top reasons to blog). Further, they provide the tips in the same way they expect their readers to implement their suggestions for those who try to take the do-it-yourself (DIY) SEO method.
The Great SEO will take a little additional time to do all of the things the rest of the world can only call “magic”. I do not want to let you down today, but this SEO tip is not designed to make a do-it-yourselfer a great SEO. It is just another piece in the puzzle that will help you to understand good SEO. I will say, however, that it is a pretty damn good tip that can help you move just a little closer to great. I still have to keep you reading regularly, so I cannot just give you that “SEO magic” all at once. Your head would explode, and I cannot have that on my conscience. Yes, imagine that, a search engine optimizer with a conscience … I guess there is just magic in the air today! Besides, I still want to leave you some reason to call on me when you have pulled all your hair out and get sick of letting business pass you by.
Now, on with today’s SEO tip!
Who Links to Your Site and Why Should You Care?
Links are at the front line of search engine optimization. The more high-quality links that point to your website, the easier it will be to rank for the things your site is about. The text within those links makes a huge impact on your ranking for certain topics. This is why many links to my blog include the words SEO and social media marketing. Those things are a focus of my blog, so it only makes sense that the links reflect this.
When important websites with a lot of authority start linking to my blog, I want to know it. I also want to be sure that they continue to link to my blog. I can control this in a couple ways, and the best of which is to keep producing consistently useful content. You know, the stuff people want to link to. Thanking them is not such a bad idea, either.
Another way to be sure the link-love keeps coming is to watch what received good links and write more of that. For example, a useful tip about a given topic (in this case, SEO) will often find its way into a lot of good streams of content, including both automated and manual linking. The automatic ones are pretty easy to manage, but the links created by people are a bit more tricky. You have to really blow somebody’s hair back to make them take the action of creating a link to you in their blogroll, or to submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and etcetera. If you want them to write about it and link to you in a blog post, you practically have to reinvent electricity or come up with something so amazing that they want to print it out and rub it all over themselves. Short of that you must at least write about things that people want to read, and present it in a fashion they will keep reading.
Finding Your Best Backlinks
You should know who is linking to your website. I don’t mean just the links that are being clicked on. I mean the links that make your site more visible and valuable to search engines. Here comes a big fat juicy SEO tip for you. It is called Open Site Explorer and the information it can tell you is more than you may see on the surface. Yes, this is where you have to pay attention to the details. For example, I just looked at an Open Site Explorer report for this blog and found the interesting facts as follows:
The Technorati tag “guerrilla-marketing” has produced a link pointing to my blog article titled “Marketing Without a Budget: Guerrilla Marketing Tips“, but the new content under this tag has moved my link off the page as newer articles arrived. So it seems to me that since that link is from a valuable source page, I should probably write something about guerrilla marketing and be sure to tag it with “guerrilla-marketing”. Oh yes, this article is kind of Guerrilla Marketing related … gosh, I am glad I was paying close attention. I am going to add that tag in this blog post.
I also noticed that there was a pretty nice link from the tag “whiteboards” that pointed to my article titled “Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates“. Perhaps I should write a follow-up to that piece and tag it appropriately.
My point is that if you pay close attention to the things which make your website rank well, there is a lot clearer path to success. Knowing that I am in the blogroll of great blogs like the ones listed below can give me a lot of reason to want to throw back some link-love to them and also keep reading their work.
These matter to me, and certainly deserve my attention (Thanks Guys). After all, they show faith in my work by linking to me. To some people, this is just a small detail, but to me it is a really important factor.
Paying attention to the sites linking to you, both automated and manually, can make a huge difference in your success. Now the question that remains is this: What will you do with this information? Were you paying attention and will you use what I have suggested? I want to guess the answer is “yes”, but there are a lot of people who do not pay attention. I hope those are your competitors and not you!
Suckers Are Easy to Find OnlineI was on the phone with a new prospective client just yesterday and he brought up the use of meta tags. I immediately felt like a time machine had just sucked me back to the 1990s when search engines gave attention to the meta keywords tag. The topic of the meta keywords tag comes up once in a while, and each time I think to myself “somebody really suckered you bigtime, buddy.”
I find it really hard to comprehend how some people imagine that something simple like meta tags will make a real difference in their website ranking in search engines. It is as if they think they have really out-smarted all the technicians over at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etcetera, with this cool trick called a meta keyword tag.
As long as there are people who ask “do meta tags help with SEO” there will be plenty of people to con them out of their money.
Why can’t the meta keywords myth just die? There was a day when a good SEO could outsmart a search engine with tricky little tactics like this, but how can somebody in 2010 really think that there is such a simple way to outrank billions of other pages vying for search engine rankings? Do these people really think they were the first on the scene and they have uncovered the golden key to the Internet? Come on … anybody smart enough to tie their shoe should be able to reason this out with just one little “duh, I guess this kind of makes sense” moment of reality-checking.
I still hear people talk about meta keywords from time to time, and more often than I like. I guess maybe it is just some people’s way of trying to sound like an expert. Maybe they will sound like they did their homework if they can start a discussion of meta tags when they call the SEO. Seriously, is that what people think my job is as a search engine optimizer … to strike up some good keywords and feed them into the back door of Google? That is either totally absurd, or so brilliant that I want to choke myself for being so dumb I didn’t think of this sooner. Perhaps all I really needed to do all this time was add some meta tags to my websites. Gosh, I have wasted so many years of my life creating useful and amazing website content that people link to and share with others. I should be punished for being so slow to catch on to this one simple fix that could have made me the king of Internet search. I guess maybe all of the SEO lessons that I have authored over the past decade and a half are useless.
OK, enough of the sarcasm … I had my fun. The fact is that although you will still see sites using the meta keywords tag, it is as my grandpappy would say: “about as useful as teets on a boar hog.” For those of you big city folks, that means boobs on a boy pig. They don’t feed the piglets, and meta keywords will not feed you, either.
Google’s Matt Cutts on Meta Keywords
There has been so much speculation of the usefulness of meta keywords that if we were sitting in a bar, I would curse like an angry sailor to make my point. My wife says that makes me sound less intelligent, and since we are not having beers together, I will just give you good solid references. Here is what Matt Cutts from Google has to say on the topic of meta keywords. In his words, “we don’t use that information in our ranking, even the least little bit.”
There was a time when the keywords meta tag mattered to search engines. It was designed to help search engines understand the overall emphasis of the page. That was a great idea to make the Internet easier for search engines to index all of the Web’s content. A few search engines even chose to use the information, but that only lasted just a short time before people started trying to attract searches for Brittany Spears and Madonna to their completely unrelated website about treating bedsores. It never really worked all that great, because above all, search engines have always read the visible text of websites, and the links pointing to the website. By the way, invisible text (text that is the same color as the page background) is also a huge mistake that a few idiots still think is a good idea, but that is another blog post.
If you really think that something so easy as a meta keywords tag is going to drive traffic to your website, ask yourself how logical that really sounds. If some slick talking SEO somewhere convinced you that meta keywords will help, take your money to the grocery store now, before that slick talker takes all your money and leaves you hungry.
Which Meta Tags Matter?
There are a couple meta tags that actually matter, so don’t just assume that all meta tags are totally useless. The meta description tag is quite important, and is often used to display a description of the page in search engines (unless there is more relevant on-page content to display). The “robots meta tag” will direct search engines to follow links on the page or not, and whether to index the page or not. This is also why we have a “robots.txt” file. The “Content-Type” meta tag tells computers the character encoding of the page. Yes, there is useful meta data in a web page, just as with any other computer file.
While I wonder why the keywords meta tag myths still circulate, I think it must just be because people want to sound smarter than they really are about the SEO industry. If you can make it sound like some really advanced programming skill is involved, it must be more important. I mean (in a booming voice) “meta keywords tag” sure does sound “techie” and important, right? So why do they even exist if they are not used by search engines? I think it is simply because of habits and lingering myths that most of the meta keywords tags on the Internet still exist. After all, there are still some meta keywords right here on my blog. I guess mostly because I have been too lazy to remove them and they don’t actually hurt anything. However, if you look at the source code on this page, you will not see a keywords meta tag, but I assure you it will still rank really nicely in search engine results.
If you still just must decorate the behind-the-scenes head section of your website, here is a meta tag generator that I wrote sometime back in 2001 or earlier. I do not know an exact date off hand, but I was able to find it in the Internet archive at archive.org from Jan 2002 (hilarious archived version). Maybe you will find it to be a cool tool, but just don’t count on those meta keywords to feed your family.
Who is Your Google Target?Have you ever taken a moment to consider what people are really looking for when they come to your website? Of course you have, right? Maybe you have tried some keyword research tools and done your best to discover as many lateral keywords as you can possibly optimize. What may be surprising is how many customers you are missing, and the relatively simple reasons why. I want to give you some Google website marketing ideas for how to improve your website traffic, and optimize the traffic you already have.
Let’s take a look at two types of website traffic that come from a Google search. I will call them “first-search” and “second-search” website traffic. Both are important, but most companies are too focused on one to even recognize the other. Their loss may be your gain!
Website Visitors Google What They Want!
I see a lot of companies scramble to be found in a Google search for what they sell, without enough consideration for the real reasons people are searching. I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody told me “we are in Google” and they think that is what matters. They may even be well ranked in Google for their product or service, and still be missing a huge number of potential sales. This often happens because much of their website traffic is from second-search users (I will explain in a moment) and competitors searching to check out the competition. I don’t know about you, but in a lot of industries, the competition is not the best target customer. Now, that is not true for every industry, because other SEO and Internet marketers are good clients for me (SEOs see “How To Market SEO and Vertical Internet Marketing“). I actually want to be a great resource to my “competition”, but for most people wanting to improve website traffic, the competition is not their best target.
Improve Website Traffic Through First Search Not Second Search
What is this “first search” and “second search” thing that I am writing about? An important Internet marketing factor that a lot of people do not measure or understand is that many people who search for something perform multiple types of searches. I will just give two main categories to explain this. I will call them “first-search” and “second-search”.
First-Search Website Traffic: First-search traffic comes when people search for what they want. If their toe hurts, they may search for “big blister on toe” as a first search. It helps them get direction. They want to know what to do with that big blister, and maybe what caused it. They are researching. They are not quite sure yet just what they want or need, but they are trying to find their way. Once they know their way and learn the industry-popular terminology and can refine a search, then they will use a second-search approach to filter through the available solutions.
Second-Search Website Traffic: If you are a podiatrist (foot doctor), you may feel that it is just great that they can find you when they search for a podiatrist, but what if you caught them in the first search? Wouldn’t it be more likely that if they found you in the first-search category that they will see you as a greater authority when they discover you again in the second-search? Then, once they figure out they need a podiatrist you will be a more likely choice to help them. Doesn’t this seem like a great idea to be an authority in both searches? Of course that makes sense, but do you think you are accomplishing the task? For most people, the answer is no. This includes your competitors.
Increased website traffic and better Google rankings are not the only things that matter. I could go into the topics of search conversion (getting more people to click on your website once they find you in Google listings) and website conversion (getting more people to take action once they are on your website). Those are both great topics for other articles, but what I want you to think about here is how to improve website traffic by answering people’s problems. In order to solve their problem, you will have to look at the core of your business. What do you do? I don’t mean looking at it as “practicing podiatry” but rather “we help people with sore toes who want something to help toe pain.”
As you notice the heading of this page states, “Google Website Marketing: How to Improve Website Traffic” and that is what I am here to tell you. “Google website marketing” is my example of first-search traffic, and it reaches my equivalent of a person with a sore toe. Once they learn more about my industry-specific terminology, they refine their search to compare solutions. For example, “reasons to blog” or “compare SEO” may be second-search considerations, because now they have a better feel for what they need.
Improve Website Traffic by Knowing Your Return Visitors
There is often a huge disparity between what a company hopes people will search for and what actually creates more business. I find that for many companies, even when they know what people search for, they often only mimic the competition by targeting the second-search users. They know that these second-search users become customers, but often ignore whether they are actually returning visitors who found them previously. Any business should target people who search for their product … the actual things that they sell. It just makes sense. What is too commonly missed is the website visitors who are actually returning first-search users, or otherwise knowing where they have been before they came to you. They may have been highly influenced long before the search term that you recognize as important. Imagine the value in knowing what they looked for the first time and honing in on those search terms. All of this is measurable, but many people just overlook the importance.
If you analyze your web server logs, your Google analytics, or other website analytics tool to find what people search for when they find your website for the first time and match it with the returning traffic, it may surprise you. Sometimes a better target is to reach people searching for the solution to a problem. Then, if you do not make them a customer in the first-search, you can be there for the second-search when they want to compare you to the competition. Analyzing your website traffic logs and giving close attention to returning website visitors can tell you a lot about what drives people to buy from you. If you are not paying attention and taking appropriate actions, you will miss a whole lot of customers.
A Real-Life First-Search and Second-Search Example
Many people find my websites for things like “compare SEO“, “lateral keywords“, “h1 tags“, and “Google SEO Starter Guide“. I rank nicely in searches for the things I do. However, I often find that some of my best clients came from first searches that were less industry-oriented, but then returned to my website as a result of a much more sophisticated search that shows they have done their homework. Reaching these readers in the first-search phase and repeatedly being there through their learning process is invaluable to me. Monitoring for these trends is important.
Maybe you rank nicely for your industry terms, too, but it is sometimes not the things that you do or sell that your best buyers will initially find you for in a Google search. If you improve your first-search exposure, you may find it a lot easier to reach the second-search buyers.
Excerpts or Full Articles: A Grizzly QuestionBlogging and SEO (being found in search engines) go hand in hand. If you have read more than a couple of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of blogging. Blogging is a huge asset to anybody wanting to be more visible to the public, and so it should not be taken lightly. If you do not have a blog, be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“.
Blogging comes with a lot of choices, and those choices include whether to truncate your blog posts and show excerpts on the home page, or to include full articles. Let us consider these options.
Truncated Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles
As you may notice, I have opted to truncate the blog articles on my home page. Until this weekend, my blog has always included full length articles on my home page, archives, tags, and categories, but I decided to try something different. I will tell you a couple of pros and cons to the decision. I will talk a bit geek for some people here, but I will circle back around to something human that everybody can clearly grasp.
How Do You Like Your Blog? (My Blog Too!)
When I looked at the option of using blog excerpts on the home page, I thought of readers first. Perhaps you have had to make this judgment call as well. Sure, I see what other bloggers do, but I seldom do things just because somebody else does it. Well, except for smoking … the cool kids smoked so I fell into that trap. When it comes to writing a blog, I like to believe I can do something original. Please tell me you didn’t already read this somewhere else. There simply is not a solid rule for this, because bloggers have different styles … millions of different styles.
I tried to be deliberate in my decision making. I tried to think of everything, and I crossed my fingers hoping it will not explode in my face on Monday when you see this, or in the future, after my decision kicks in with more readers. I considered website performance issues such as page load times, average article length, length to truncate the excerpts, search engine indexing, and others. I will be happy to share my thoughts on these matters and l how I addressed them if you ask me.
From a reader standpoint, I know that you do not want to wait around for a page to load. Nobody wants to wait … even for me. Crazy thinking, I know. I considered how it may affect existing search engine rankings, because my home page ranks very well for anything I write. I considered a long list of other technology issues, but I mostly considered you, the reader.
How do you want my blog to work? After all, I am writing this for you as much as for me. I do not just write this to be stagnant and without public attention. Without readers and potential clients who actually take action on my blog, I will have a pretty hard time explaining to my wife why our kids are eating so much cake instead of other kid food (my wife is a totally amazing cake decorator, by the way). Cake does not make a great diet in the long run … believe me, I tried. I like eating grilled animals, and she does not make that kind of cakes. I have to buy my animals the hard way, so I need to find readers with action running through their veins and ready to push the marketing go button. That means I have to reach about 30 squillion of you before one reader takes their business to the next level with my services. I cannot do that alone, and I cannot do it with a mediocre blog … and neither can you. So I had to take this pretty seriously.
Blog Excerpt Pros and Cons
Something I knew going into this is that by truncating my blog posts and using short excerpts on the home page instead of full articles, I would be increasing the number of blog posts showing right upfront. This means people can scan through things easier to find what they want to read, and then click on it if it looks interesting to them. A couple of thoughts on this were that it should look interesting, and even quicker than before. I would have to try and set the hook with new readers sooner than ever with just a short excerpt. People don’t like to click around to find what they want to read … they want it right now. The three click rule is written in the laws of Internet statistics (I should add that to my 11 Important Internet Marketing Laws article). We “Web Geeks” know the rule of three clicks, and we know that readers will go *poof* like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight if we ask for a fourth click. I also had to consider that a massive number of people enter through pages other than my home page. I had to know where they enter, and why. I had to analyze their usage and consider the user bounce rate of the home page in relation to other pages, and a whole lot of other great geek almighty blogging factors. I really needed to feel secure about this decision, but I do not want to feel too secure, because it is not my decision as much as it is your decision. If you do not like it, I need to have a quick fist-full of clicks to bring it back to blogging as usual. Even if you do not tell me with comments (which I hope you will), you will still tell me by your usage patterns. Make no mistake … the masses will win this decision, and mine is only one little vote in that decision.
Using excerpts also means more database work to load all the articles, tags, categories, and images. Since I generally try to include just one or two images per post. Using full articles, including one image per post was fine, and I could still load full articles pretty quickly. Increasing the number of posts on my home page means increasing the number of images on the home page, because I wanted each article to be represented with a thumbnail and I would be adding more articles. More images normally means slower pages. At the same time, I had to weigh in the consideration that most of my blog posts are very long. Yes, I have no idea when to shut up most of the time. So maybe I could balance that out, since the text of a typical Murnahan blog post is about long enough to make up for a huge image download.
Another consideration in favor of truncated excerpts in place of full blog articles is reducing possibilities of duplicate content. It is a big problem for a lot of blogs, because the same full article content is on the home page, each individual article, archive pages, tag pages, category pages, and etcetera. I have always done things to help reduce duplicate content issues (search engines don’t like duplicate content) like using a meta “noindex, follow” tag in my archives, blog tags, and category pages. That helps, but I also really wanted to focus on individual articles, so along with implementing excerpts, I reworked my XML sitemap to boost the indexing priority of individual posts and reduce the priority of categories, tags, and archives, which already had “noindex,follow” meta tags in the headers.
Blog Usability Comes First
What I know above all else is that you, the reader is what matters more than anything. I know that if I write information that people can use … the things that they really like, and that other people cannot or did not produce as well as I did … that is what matters. How much does it matter to me, and to blogging in general? It is what makes the big difference in why most SEO fail at link building. Great … no, fantastic website content is what matters more than even the blog structure. If you have great usable content on your side, you can kill grizzly bears with a toothpick and a rubber band.
Grizzly Bear SEO and Pink Ponies for Sale
Just as I was writing this, I was alerted to a very fresh article about grizzly bear SEO writing. The article linked back to a piece that I wrote titled “SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies for Sale“. What?! Yes, this is what makes my SEO world spin, and I do know when people link to my work. It is usefulness and marketing talent that matters more than website structure, alone. Blog structure matters a whole lot for SEO, so do not get me wrong, but the bottom line is usefulness. That means useful in every way, and sometimes that means testing and pushing the envelope.
If you get all the pieces just right, and you give people something useful and interesting, the rest of the SEO factors fall into place divinely. To see what I mean, just brave the wild Internet enough to go and see the grizzly bear article I mentioned, along with my response to the grizzly bear poo and pink ponies offered out there in the SEO marketplace.
Now I ask for your input. What do you think? Do you like the new truncated blog excerpts or full blog articles? Answer me with your comments, or answer me with your actions. Either way, I am paying close attention and I do care. After all, my kids can only eat so much cake!
